Nocturne
by Illogicallysound
Summary: Dreams are places where choices need not be made. Nightmares are places where choices are too many. Sarah secured her fate by making her choice and Jareth his by giving her one. Now they must both face the consequences.
1. Chapter 1

Author's note:: What you have before you is my first attempt at Labyrinth fanfiction. I've always found the story enthralling, and have always wondered 'what if.' The plot calls for something akin to a novel in size, will end up as a Jareth/Sarah piece, and explores the possibility of these characters driven to work together with their flaws. Jareth will still be very much what he was in the first movie, but this isn't his game...

Summary:: Dreams are places where choices need not be made. Nightmares are places where choices are too many. Sarah secured her fate by making her choice and Jareth his by giving her one. Now they must both face the consequences in a place where the only labyrinth in sight is one they cannot see.

Disclaimer:: Own not, want lots.

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**Nocturne**

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Chapter One

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_"You are late." _

_It pained her. This fantasy was so unlike the well-worn edges of her last that it tore at her senses with sharp resignation. There was no taunting, no riddle to be solved and child to save. Whimsy had fled into the memory of an old challenge and the twisted tendrils of desire lay amputated at the feet of her enemy. _

_Here she was a pawn, little more. There she could have been so much more. Here the halls were dark in their splendor, elongated and contorted and an endless path of unease. This was no Labyrinth, tailored to her dreams. It was nothing she had ever imagined before, and to her there was nothing more frightening. _

_Eyes on the contorted clock, Sarah could not help but allow a desolate smile curve her lips. "If you don't mind me saying so, your Majesty, the only hour your timepiece reads is the thirteenth."_

_"And you were to be here at the twelfth hour, were you not?" _

_"I wasn't aware that I was meant to come here at all. And even when I did, it was already the thirteenth hour when I arrived." _

_The woman, nothing more than a dark human pillar atop a thrown, stared at her shrewdly, narrow eyes cold with her schemes, "You have no one to blame but yourself. Had you arrived here before the clocks..."_

_"Again, I didn't realize this was a footrace..."_

_"Insolence!"_

_Sarah bowed her head, humble in her weary fear, "Not at all, your Majesty. Confusion, maybe. You've never told me why I'm here." _

I

The winter chill ached bitterly, settling in the injured joint of her left knee with very little thought afforded to her. Hours bent in the passenger seat of an acquaintance's car helped matters less, having set both her and her feet to sleep while locking her weak knee with stiffness typical of this time of year. She'd taken several lingering minutes to enjoy the whirring of the vehicle's heater before bidding farewell with a thank you to the young woman who had kindly volunteered to drive her home for the holidays, slipping a worn ten dollar bill into the unused ashtray as she slung her cloth sack over her shoulder and maneuvered her way out of the door.

Silence met her in the foyer, as did shadows, and she instantly missed the crunch of ice and snow beneath her feet.

Karen and Toby were out, clear by the way her call of hello was only met with its echo. They were last minute shopping if her intuition was still anything to go by, gathering gifts for Christmas a week before they were due. She moved on unhindered by her solitude and her house keys clambered loudly when she tossed them across the countertop, her bag thudded gently as it hit the floor. With a flip of the switch she was able to inspect the kitchen for any changes in the last sixth months (the walls were darker, the cabinets lighter), and discovered that she sincerely liked them.

There was no note taped to the refrigerator door informing her that they would be home after dinner, that leftovers from the meal the night before were there for her to heat. If Sarah were to check, there would likely be nothing for her to quickly prepare at all. She didn't blame her stepmother, who would have left a feast had she known that her daughter was coming home that night. In fact, she thought very little about food at all, choosing instead to locate the coffee grinds and filters, needing something caffeinated and warm to both sharpen her thoughts and warm her still chilled limbs.

Gurgles and small streams of steam were working their way out of the brewer when Merlin tucked his aging head around the doorway, his nose lifted in the air at the familiar smells. Sarah's face broke into a grin when she saw him, and she hurried away from her inspection of Toby's childlike artwork (the cliche-like stick figures holding hands; mother, sister, brother, and dog), appropriately pinned to every surface of the white refrigerator doors.

"Look at you!" Her fingers sank into the white and black fur at the base of the sheep dog's neck, lowering her face so that she was eye-level with her most faithful friend. She'd bored her roommates with stories of his youth since her first year in college, but fond recollections were nothing compared to the real thing.

The real thing that was licking her chin and nuzzling her cheek with his wet nose. "Missed you too, Merlin," she muttered, affectionate pressure heavy behind her eyes.

He remained close to her legs as she prepared her coffee, and sat by her chair when she took a seat at the table. As a reward for his patience, Sarah tucked her hand beneath Merlin's chin and scratched it as she stared through the French doors into the back garden. Her mind moved along a well traveled road, memories of a different kitchen in a different house. Karen had regretted selling Sarah's childhood home as much as Sarah regretted having to leave it, but payments were payments and her stepmother had been determined to use the life insurance to fund Sarah's dream of private college instead of the old mortgage (it was then, at seventeen with crutches and a broken heart that Sarah had realized that her father's widow loved her, that her life would be no Cinderella fairy tale, after all).

Merlin sighed, as if recognizing her thoughts for what they were and rested the entire weight of his head on her lap—for a single instant, with the realization that only Merlin would be there to see her cry, Sarah entertained the notion of a nostalgic sob.

She drank her coffee in calm silence instead.

II

"Have you lost more weight?" Karen asked as she released her from their hug and kissed her temple.

Her stepmother's hair was longer, bobbed around her jaw in a style that was more practical than attractive. It'd felt dry against Sarah's cheek, looked duller than its typical strawberry, as if all the strands were easing together into a faint grey instead of racing to the goal one at a time. It was a unwarranted thought to have, but mourning made the older woman a mere shadow of her old, tailored beauty.

Sarah patted her stomach as if feeling for change in its shape, "I don't think so..."

They stepped away from one another and allowed Toby his turn, the exuberant child refusing to wait for his older sister to stoop and lift him off the floor. Face buried in her thigh, he hugged her knee and started recounting the entire events of the night, divulging what they'd bought her for Christmas before his thoughts ran on a tangent and his monologue stretched into a conglomeration of everything exciting that had taken place since he'd last seen her. Sarah understood none of it, but smiled encouragingly as she pried his hands from her bad leg and wrestled him up onto the curve of her hip.

"Have you been a good goblin or a bad goblin this year?" She asked, tone serious even as a smile threatened to arrest her lips.

"Is there a difference?" Karen quipped, gathering the bags she'd set by the stairs in order to give her daughter a hug.

"Sometimes," Sarah grinned, tickling Toby's stomach before kissing his cheek and setting him on the floor.

"Does he still have the dreams?" she asked when her brother padded into the kitchen in search for Merlin.

"Infrequently, we haven't had a problem since the summer. I never thanked you for being there," Karen smiled warmly when Sarah helped her with the bags, "we would have found him, but it would have taken longer if you hadn't been here to help look."

"Don't mention it, it was like playing hide and seek..." _with a sleepwalker_.

Karen chuckled and led them to the sitting room. Once they'd had a relationship full of criticisms and complaints. Arguments had been their method of discussion and long days of silence their only method of getting along. At fifteen, Sarah had blamed her stepmother for the fault-lines in their communication, at seventeen she'd started to blame herself. It wasn't until she'd spent a semester away that she'd understood that blame was arbitrary and obsolete. They'd had both failed one another, love was moving beyond that and finding common ground (made easier by the void that now existed in both of their lives).

This was typical of them now, taking a seat and spending the first several hours of Sarah's visits home to catch up on what was missed. There was so much that they still didn't discuss, Sarah more than Karen, but the good intentions were still there and the pattern a comfortable one.

"I set up the guest bedroom for you. There's a new wardrobe for your clothes, and I had the latch fixed on the door so it will close. With a lock, so if ever...you know...Toby..."

"Thank you," Sarah tucked her legs under her body and leaned against the couch's armrest, watching as her stepmother took the armchair opposite her. The young boy in question ran past the doorway, sounds of a six year old's fabricated train chase streaming behind him, "Really, thank you..." she laughed.

III

There was a time when she had believed fate was a convergence of accidents, a time when free will had no place in her tales and in her dreams. At fifteen, she discovered that fate was a game, a puzzle to be won and a resolution to be celebrated then grieved. Then, at seventeen, Sarah had discovered that fate, like time, was not real. That it was a construct of the human mind and of the human desires, that it kept people imprisoned by their own wants.

A harsh lesson, one marked with scars.

She brushed her hair before laying down for the night. It was a habit she'd grown to dislike but one she couldn't bring herself to break. Shorter than she used to wear it in high school, the dark strands rested just below the nape of her neck, long enough to hide the thin scar that stretched from her clavicle to jaw...The sight of it always reminded her of how she'd received it, how'd she'd earned the deeper scars that ran along the bottom of her knee (the ones from the injury that had bitten through ligament and muscle), and she would give anything not to _be _reminded.

When she was younger, she used to imagine that the dreams she'd refused would haunt her until old age. That the man that had chosen to torment her would do so until she died of fright one day, and that her heart would mourn the loss of not having to choose. That's what dreams were, not needing to make choices to be happy, having everything without consequence. She had learned that by choosing she had lost...

After the Labyrinth and before her father's death, Sarah had dreamed of ordinary things when she slept. Of school and the odd looking but still attractive boy in her prose class. She dreamed of failing tests, of acceptance letters from Harvard and Dartmouth and Cornell. Dreams were of success and nightmares full of failure, ordinary failure. But after she'd become acquainted with her mortality, of her father's mortality, they began to fill with a sinister fantasy, her Goblin King nowhere in sight.

At twenty, Sarah was certain that dreams and fate were the same; she was certain that they had a pulse and that they had a rhythm.

And she was convinced that there was something about to go horribly wrong with hers.


	2. Chapter 2

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Chapter Two

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_'You were supposed to be here already, Sarah.' _

_The woman in the dark cloak looked at her wearily. She had the pale skin and pale eyes of an ether but the temperament of a well-informed shadow. Sarah's opinion of her was the same as it had been the last time they had spoken, fear. Not the fear that settled like ice in her bones, but the weighty sort that rested with familiar heaviness on her mind. The kind that recognized that things were coming that could not be avoided. _

_Only, unlike their previous meetings where the fear was dull, far off and tempered by the knowledge that what was to come was in unforeseeable future, it was acute. The unforeseeable future was doing a tap dance in her line of vision and Sarah could do nothing but watch. _

_'I don't know where here is,' she said forlornly, 'you've never told me where I needed to go.'_

_Her companion's cloak fluttered like a wave of feathers, the fog around them was not so dense as to hide the forest, ''Here' is here, and I am afraid and you have been traveling along the right path. But, perhaps you need help,' the woman uttered dreamily, 'incentive.'_

_Belligerently, Sarah stamped her foot, frustrated with the knowledge of what incentive meant, 'I don't need it, I need a well explained reason and a map.' _

_'Don't be foolish, your kind always needs incentive. You've denied the fulfillment of your choice long enough, must we provide you with a reason to make another?'_

_''Choice?'_

_'How feeble the human memory is. Let me remind you...' _

I

The ice on the sedan's windshield required an iron pick for removal. Unfortunately, Sarah did not own one, nor could she find the scraper and brush that Karen had sworn was under the passenger seat. Equipped with only a metal spatula and unbreakable will, the young woman spent ten minutes clearing ovals of visibility on both the front and back windshields. The vehicle's defrost setting helped clear the rest, giving her enough glass to peer through as she drove into town.

Conditions on the road were worse. Wrestling with the steering controls and her own anxiety, Sarah was late for her rendezvous with Stephen and Brook. Her original plans for her three week break had been to spend them in comfortable solitude; dabble a little in reading, take the time to navigate the ravine bordering three sides of their property, familiarize herself once more with sleep and television. All of her contacts from high school had been, generally, casual and superficial. Some friendly acquaintances here, a persistent male there. The engaged couple in question were the most natural of the former and persistent in their own right, having extended overtures of friendship many times throughout the last two years of their secondary education, until finally she had been forced to accept.

Brakes were applied carefully and reverently. When the car stopped, Sarah's grip loosened around the ridges of the car's steering wheel.

She was thankful for the blast of frigid air that hit her face as she stepped out, with her unkept hair tucked beneath her knit hat, the weather had given her a reason to wrap a scarf around her exposed neck.

Across the narrow street she could see the sides of her friends, both seated in the window of the town's only cafe. She watched as Stephen gesticulated wildly, very likely half-way through one of his lively tales. Brook was looking all the world like she'd heard it before and was only appearing enraptured by it to be polite. The ding of the bell above the door drew their attention to her as she entered, and Sarah couldn't help but to return their matching grins.

"The final third has arrived," Stephen announced, voice lowering in the best mimicry of majestic that he could manage. It only managed to resemble the croak of a toad, but Sarah gave a small bow as she approached regardless.

"Late as usual," Brook deadpanned, standing to give her friend a brief hug as well as access to the empty chair.

Sarah leaned down to kiss Stephen on the cheek as soon as Brook freed her, and the eccentric twenty-one year old waggled his eyebrows at her while touching his cheek, "I shall endeavor to never wash it again."

Both women rolled their eyes in response, blaming it on the fact his default social setting was exuberant flirtation.

"The roads are awful," Sara said by way of explanation, taking her seat without removing any of her outerwear. The cafe was heated, but all of that exposure to the windchill had made her permanently cold, "I should have just walked."

Brook cast her a dark glance, "Six miles? With your knee. No, I don't think so."

"I could have given you a ride," the canary grin on Stephen's face garnered two identical groans of disapproval.

"Because that's perfectly reasonable," his fiancee countered.

"Hills might have been a problem, though. And turns. This thing doesn't have power-steering." He ran his hands along the hard plastic of his chair's wheels and shrugged, "But I wouldn't say it would be _im_possible. Or unreasonable."

"Just uncomfortable," Sarah muttered.

Stephen smirked, "Not at all, my lady, I wouldn't feel a thing."

"You're the one marrying him," Sarah chided unsympathetically when Brook rested her face, distraught, in her palm.

The waitress arrived during the exchange, a middle-aged woman they were all familiar with from past meetings over coffee and breakfast. They placed their orders, and something Stephen said forced Brook to retaliate with sarcasm. Sarah watched the banter with mild amusement, sinking into the hard folds of her chair. The sparse waves of falling snow caught her eye and she settled for gazing out the window. Winter had never been her favorite season, more so after her seventeenth birthday, but she liked to watch snow fall. It was serene. Very peaceful.

"Look at the size of that thing," Stephen muttered, catching Sarah's attention.

She raised her brow and settled her cheek on her palm before looking at him, "Size of what?"

He pointed out the window, just over her right shoulder, "That raven-"

"Are you sure it's a raven?" inquired Brook.

"What's the difference?"

"...Everything," she quipped.

"-Look at that big black bird, then" he snarked back.

Sarah shook her head at her friends but took the bait. Shifting in her seat, she craned her head just enough to look where Stephen had pointed. For selfish reasons entirely, she hoped that it was a raven, although she was fairly certain they didn't flock here at all.

It wasn't on Karen's car, per se, but it was close enough. Sarah squinted and saw that it was perched on the iron curve of the parking meter, its black head twisted to the side as it appraised the lot, surveying the slush covered parking spaces for something, finding nothing. With a ruffle of its black feathers, the bird sifted its wings then hefted its weight into the air before settling on a newspaper stand nearby, its skittish gaze traveling the street. Looking, once more.

When it caught her eyes and held, Sarah blinked.

"It's a crow," she said faintly.

Brook hummed, "I thought they always traveled in flocks."

"Murders," Sarah corrected, swallowing the dryness in her throat, "Not this one."

"Maybe its friends are late for the party," adding sugar to his coffee, Stephen licked the stirring straw and gave Sarah a pointed look.

II

Once more, the entire world was etched in white. Rather, the entire world beyond the thin glass of her window was etched in white. Closer inspection would show that many of the trees were tilted, skewed from another ice storm that had crept through the night with the stealth of a sinister dream. The slope of land behind the house that dipped then curved sharply into the edge of a ravine made up the view from her room, and Sarah could spot the debris from the trees too old to support the weight of their branches and the frozen onslaught from the night before.

Allowing the sheer, teal curtains to obscure her view once more, Sarah turned away from the window and dragged her feet across the bare floor. Her knee was in a sore state this morning, stiff from hours of kicking in her sleep and the exposure to the cold after awaking. The bottle of anti-inflammatory medication she kept on her vanity was her first stop before gathering the clothes she'd wear for the day into her arms. A hot shower was in order and after that a cup of coffee to stave off mid-morning exhaustion.

Karen met her in the kitchen at a quarter past eleven and managed to refrain from chiding her for sleeping in. Instead, she made a small quip about the towel Sarah had wrapped tightly around her wet hair and reminded her that they did, in fact, own a hair dryer and that, last time Toby had seen his sister wearing such a contraption, he'd been convinced that towels were the latest fashion. Something, that Karen might had, did not turn out so well.

Sarah rolled her eyes but took it with a grain of salt, unraveling her hair from its confine as she allowed the coffee to brew. Merlin howled noisily when she tossed the wet towel over his face, and slouched to the floor with his paws over his blinded eyes.

"We're having a late lunch with the Johnsons, today, if you'd like to go. Carol told me that Stephen would be happy to see you again."

Unable to tell Karen that too many doses of Stephen reminded her of the cold bite of metal and the color red, Sarah hummed instead while taking a sip from her hot beverage. The young man was nice, as demonstrated by their lunch the day before, forgiving even, but she wasn't entirely in the mood to share his company two days in a row. Not after being so recently reminded of the fate she'd dealt him.

"It would mean a lot to him, to me, if you came..." again, with the hyperbole that only Karen could manage.

The brown liquid scorched her throat as she swallowed, but Sarah was already shaking her head in response, "I'm sorry, I can't. I need to call housing today and talk to them about the bill, they're charging me for the wrong dorm again. And you know how I get when I have to call them..."

Disappointment laced her mother's sigh, but Karen nodded in affirmation. "Could you grab Merlin's medication from the clinic then, while I'm gone? I'll have the car, so you'll have to make the walk into town, but the vet's office closes today at two for the weekend..."

"Yeah, of course."

"I'll leave a check on the counter for you, but make sure your hair is dry before you take off. I don't want you catching death...and you should take him with you, he hasn't gotten the recommended exercise since November."

Karen's voice continued to trail behind her, even as she left the house with Merlin a half an hour later. Waving at the oft-time, overly matron woman, Sarah blinked into the brightness of the day and directed her companion toward town. Joints sore with old age, Merlin proved to be as slow as her, remaining at her side with a slow trot. A leash wasn't required, it never had been with him.

III

She should have known that this was coming.

Merlin cowered behind her as she approached the porch, fur covering his eyes as he tucked his nose into the snow. He'd done well for such a long walk, especially for snow so deep and walkways so icy, that this new behavior drew Sarah from her straying thoughts to her surroundings.

"What's wrong, boy?" Of course, her old friend wasn't going to answer her, but Sarah had always been one for rhetorical questions, why stop now?

An eerie cry sounded above them, a cliché that was meant for a horror movie. Blinking rapidly, Sarah lifted her eyes and saw what she already knew. A crow, very likely the one from the afternoon before, remained perched on the outer edge of the rain gutter. In the time she took to watch it, the bird flexed its wings and craned its neck, its eyes staring down at a point she anxiously hoped wasn't her.

Slamming the door behind her, Sarah called out for Karen, selfishly hoping that three hours was enough time to finish a luncheon.


End file.
